“The curse. The curse. Everyone knows about Malvolia’s curse. Oh, my father will kill me. They will probably lock me up in a convent!” She begins to sob again, and then seeing that I am still not with the program, she says, “Before her sixteenth birthday, the princess shall prick her finger on a spindle and die.”
“But you’re not dead.”
“No. The fairy Flavia changed it so I would merely sleep. The whole kingdom would sleep, to wake only when I was wakened by true love’s first kiss.”
“Uh-huh.” She’s nuts.
“The old lady was Malvolia, do you not see? She came with the dresses, gained my trust. She had probably been watching me all my life. She brought with her a spindle. She knew I would make a wish, and when I did…”
“You’re saying she stabbed you with that spindle thing?”
“Exactly. It is the curse. I have made the curse come true.”
And she starts blubbering harder.
“Hey, calm down,” I say. “It’s going to be okay.”
Now she stands and begins pacing. “They warned me so many times. It is practically the only subject upon which I conversed with my parents. It was their worst fear, and it has come true.”
I try to think of what my parents’ worst fear is—me not getting into college, maybe. Or having to go to one of those community colleges that’s near a good school, so they could just tell everyone “Jack went to Boston” or whatever. They’d die.
But I say, “Exactly. It’s over. You went to sleep, and you’re awake now because of me and my magical kiss. Your parents will probably be so happy you’re okay that they won’t even be mad.”
“Do you really think that?”
“Sure. It’s like this one time I totaled my car. My mom was driving by, and she saw the wreck. She was so happy I wasn’t dead that she didn’t even…” I stop. The princess is staring at me like I’m speaking in tongues. “Anyway, I’m sure they’ll just be okay with it. You’re their little princess, right?”
She’s stopped crying, and now she nods. “Perhaps you are right.”
“I know I am.”
“What is the date? I need to know how long I have slept.”
I check my watch’s date feature. “It’s June twenty-third.”
“Oh, that is not so bad then. A month. I missed my birthday party, which is a shame, and they will need to explain to the guests, but still…”
Her eyes fall on my watch. “What is that?”
“A watch.”
She picks up my wrist, examines it, then holds it to her ear. “A clock? On your wrist? How strange.” She pulls back from me and examines my clothes, the flag T-shirt.
“What is that?” She points to the numbers on the shirt.
“The year. Old Navy puts the year on all their flag T-shirts. It’s sort of a racket, I guess—you have to buy a new one every year.”
“That…is…the…year?” She looks sort of sick. Her face is suddenly almost the same color green as her eyes.
“Well, I got it last year. We always get them for when we go watch fireworks. But I probably won’t get one this year, come to think of it, because—”
“That is the year? The year!”
“Well, last year.”
She begins to shake. “Oh, my…oh, no.” She crumples back onto the floor, as she was when I first saw her. “It cannot be true. It cannot.”
I kneel beside her. “What’s the matter now? I thought you were fine.”
She looks at me, then starts screaming. “Fine? Fine? I have been asleep nearly three hundred years!”
Outside on the stairs, I hear a commotion, people running, then yelling.
“Stop! Thief!”
Travis appears at the door. “Jack, we gotta go. They’re all awake, and they’re after me for stealing the crown!”
Chapter 7
Things get a little crazy then. There’s Travis at the door and then two guards with actual swords. When they come in, Travis starts yelling, “I don’t have them! Search me if you don’t believe me—just don’t behead me!” One of the swords swings around, and he jumps. “Get those things away from me!”
Then a bunch more people show up. Most of them are holding fancy old dresses.
Next is a woman, who I’m guessing is the one the princess called “pudding-faced Lady Brooke,” because her face does look as beige and bland as vanilla pudding. Talia runs to her, screaming with anguish. “Lady Brooke! I have done it! I have done it!”
“Done what, dear?” Lady Brooke says.
“Ruined everything. I am so sorry.”
Travis has managed to edge away from the guards in the confusion when the dressmakers showed up. Now, he tugs my arm. “Come on, man.”
I start to go, glancing back at the princess, who’s still wailing away.
“Wait!” the princess screams, loud enough to make everyone in the room stop what they’re doing and look at her. Everything is silent, and I realize that no one but Talia and I know that they’ve been asleep for hundreds of years.
Finally, pudding-faced Lady Brooke says, “What now, dear?”
The princess points at me. “He cannot leave.”
“Why not?”
“Because he has kissed me!”
Every eye in the room turns on me. The guards notice Travis again, but this time they grab both of us.
“Have you defiled the princess?” one guard demands, getting close with the sword.
“No…I mean, I don’t think so.”
“No!” Talia says. “I am not defiled in the least. But he must stay.”
“Who are you?” Lady Brooke asks.
“I’m Jack O’Neill…from Florida…I guess I broke some spell. No need to thank me. If you’ll just call off your guard before he removes something, I’ll get going.”
The princess lunges toward me. “You cannot go. You have broken the spell. Do you know what that means?” When I don’t answer, she says, “It means you are my true love.”
“Cuckoo! Cuckoo!” Travis whispers.
I ignore him. “True love? But I don’t even know your name.”
“My name?” She looks surprised. “Oh, well, that is easy enough. Everyone knows that.”
“Except me.” Once you tell me, can I leave?
“Very well. It is probably best to have a proper introduction.” She looks at Pudding Face and says, “Lady Brooke.”
Lady Brooke nods, although she doesn’t look happy about it, and gestures toward me. “Jack O’Neill, of Florida, you are presented to Her Royal Highness, Princess Talia.”
Talia.
“It is customary to bow at this time,” Talia says.
“Your name is Talia? I didn’t know…”
“And yet, that is what you called me when you…”
“I know.” I shake my head. “I mean, I didn’t know your name, but somehow I guessed or something. It was weird, like someone told it to me.”
She nods. “True love. It was meant to be.”
“Look,” I say, “I might want to go out sometime, but as far as true love—”
“But you woke me! And I can only be awakened by true love’s kiss. And besides, I am a beautiful princess. How could you not love me?”
Easy.
Travis looks at Talia, then at the hands of the guards who are holding him, and then back at Talia. “So, um, Your Royalness, do you think you could maybe let us go?”
“Yeah, it’s—ah—getting late.” It’s actually only twelve thirty, but who knows if these people can even tell time. “Our tour group’s waiting for us.”
“Highness, this one is a thief!” the guard behind Travis says. “And if this person was with him, he must be an accomplice.”
“I’m no thief,” I say, “and neither is Travis.”
“The crown was in his hands!” says the guard.
“He didn’t take anything, and I’m the one who broke the curse and saved you all. Doesn’t that count for anything?”
“What cu
rse?” Lady Brooke says. “What is he talking about?”
Talia ignores her. “Yes. Guards, you must unhand this gentleman at once. He is an honored guest and a friend of my future husband. You must both stay for supper.”
Future husband? Does she mean me? “Excuse me, but I’m not—”
“Talia…” Lady Brooke says. “You cannot mean to invite this…this…commoner to supper. It is the eve of your birthday ball.”
Talia starts to cry again. “No, Lady Brooke. Do you not understand? I have touched a spindle! A spindle! We have all been asleep for a great while, and this…” She gestures toward me. “This commoner has awakened me.”
“You have touched a spindle, you say?” Lady Brooke’s puddingy jaw is hanging.
Talia nods.
“A spindle, you say?”
“Yes!”
Lady Brooke cradles her forehead in her hands. “I have left you alone for ten minutes, and you touched a spindle and slept for…for…”
“Three hundred years.”
“Ah!” Lady Brooke looks like she’s been stabbed. “Oh, not again, not again…” She recovers. “And you have been awakened by a…a…”
“Really great guy?” I volunteer.
Talia nods. “He will stay for supper.” She looks at me. “You will stay for supper?”
I nod. I can handle it if that’s what it takes for them to let me go—even though they’ll probably serve squirrel or something. “That’s fine. Just let me call the hotel and tell them where we are.” I take out my cell phone.
“What is that?” Princess Talia says.
“A phone.” She keeps staring at it. In fact, everyone stops what they’re doing, gathers around, and stares. “You can, um, talk to people on it.”
Except I can’t get a signal. Duh. There’s no tower here. Suddenly, it dawns on me what Talia said: I have been asleep nearly three hundred years! If that’s true, this place is like a time warp. Princess Talia really did screw things up.
And all I’m thinking is, How did they go so long without eating or peeing?
Everyone’s still staring at the phone, which lights up and makes beeping noises. Think how jacked they’d get if it actually worked.
“We have to go there,” I say. “They’ll be waiting for us.”
“But surely your friends must have known of your journey,” Talia says.
“We sort of sneaked off.”
“Then we must send a messenger,” Talia says. “Simply tell me the name of the inn in which you are staying, and it shall be done.”
Problem one: I have no idea where the hotel is. Problem two: There’s a huge hedge around the whole country. Problem three: I am not—and I mean not—marrying this princess.
“Does this help?” Travis pulls a postcard out of his pocket. It has a photo of our hotel on the front. This causes another spasm of activity as everyone has to gather around to look at the photo. Finally, Travis says, “The address is on the back, I think.”
Talia hands it to Pudding Face, who looks dangerously close to fainting. She examines it a moment, then says, “That is two days’ journey.”
It seemed pretty far but not two days.
“Nah,” Travis says. “It was about two hours on the bus.”
Pudding Face looks puzzled. “Bus?”
“Yah. It’s sort of like a car only…you got the wheel here? Has that been invented yet?”
Talia straightens her shoulders, and even Lady Brooke seems to have recovered enough to glare at Travis.
“I guess it has,” Travis says. “Well, a bus is sort of a wheel thing with a motor, and fast.” He looks at them. “Okay, I can see you don’t get the bus thing. Maybe I could, like, take your guards out and show it to them if, um, they’d let go of me and get their swords out of my butt.”
Talia nods. “Do as he says.”
The guards look disappointed, but they let go of Travis, and he gestures to them to follow him. “Hey, do you guys have a chain saw?” Travis is saying as they leave.
When he is gone, Talia turns to me. “Well, then, we must find you some proper clothing. If we are to marry, you must meet my father.” Then, in case I don’t get it, she adds, “The king. So we can arrange the wedding.”
Lady Brooke finally topples to the ground. I’m pretty close to joining her.
I should have stayed with the tour!
Part III
Jack and Talia
Chapter 1:
Talia
My life is ruined.
I dispatch Lady Brooke to find Jack a room and some clothing. Then I go back to the task I began, I thought, this morning, but apparently almost three hundred years ago—choosing dresses for the ball. There is no reason not to have a ball. Yes, I am three hundred sixteen years old (give or take a year) rather than sixteen years old, but since I have neither starved to death, nor died of thirst while asleep, it seems as though my body has been somehow suspended in time all these years. Besides, Jack would not have kissed me had I been a crone. Therefore, tomorrow will still be my sixteenth birthday, and I am still entitled to my party, so I still need dresses.
The bad news is that the most beautiful dresses were supplied by someone whom I now know was an evil witch bent upon destroying me because she was annoyed at not being invited to a previous party (I will say, Father and Mother were rather shortsighted in not simply inviting her—what would it have cost, an extra pheasant and perhaps some turnips?), so I will need to continue my search.
I venture into the first, then the second room. I know I should go looking for Mother and Father, but I simply cannot face them yet. I do not want to tell them what I have done. They will never forgive me.
It is in the third room that I see Father. He looks distraught.
“Talia, I am so glad to have found you.”
Although, truthfully, he does not look glad in the least.
“I have terrible news,” he continues. “The ball must be canceled.”
“But why?” Although I have some idea why. He has discovered my folly with the spindle, and he means to punish me. I prepare to bawl, possibly to wail. I am an excellent wailer.
But Father says something even more surprising.
“I do not know, my pet. It seems there are no guests.”
“No guests? Whatever do you mean?”
“It is the queerest thing. The lookouts saw the first ships off in the distance at nine o’clock. By ten thirty, some were on the verge of entering the harbor. But then they simply disappeared.”
“Disappeared?” I repeat what he has said to give me time to think.
Father nods. “I fear, daughter, that there is something afoot here, that we might be on the verge of war, or worse, that I may have been victimized by black magic, the dark art of the witch Malvolia.”
Malvolia. Oh, no. In an instant, I understand what happened to the ships. They did not turn around, nor were they bewitched, not really. They may have tried to enter our harbor. But when they did, it was not there. The kingdom was obscured from sight by a giant wood, as Flavia said in her idiotic spell. They thought they had gone to the wrong place. The guests, the visiting royalty, even the special prince who might have been my husband, they have been dust for centuries, and I am merely a three-hundred-sixteen-or-so-year-old princess with absolutely no prospects whatsoever.
It will take a great deal of tact to explain this to Father.
“I am sorry, my dear daughter.”
He is sorry. Would it be possible simply to feign ignorance of the whole situation? Pretend I have no idea what happened to the ships, no comprehension of what caused—I am certain—numerous additional changes to the kingdom?
But I remember Jack’s clothing and the strange flashing object he carried with him, Travis’s talk of buses. Certainly the world changed during our three-hundred-year hibernation, as surely as it changed during the three hundred years before that, and as soon as Father remarks the changes, he will understand their cause. If he does not, Lady Brooke wi
ll be certain to tell him.
“Father?” I touch his shoulder.
“Yes, my princess?”
“I believe…” I take his arm, sweet as I can, and guide him toward a chair. “I believe you should sit down.”
He does, and when he does, I begin to tell my story.
“I touched the spindle, and then at the next moment, a commoner named Jack was waking me up,” I conclude.
Father is silent.
“Father? Are you…is everything quite all right?”
“You say you touched a spindle, Talia? A spindle?”
“It was no fault of mine.”
“No fault of yours? It was every fault of yours.” He looks, suddenly, like God’s revenge against murder. “Have we taught you nothing? How many times have we told you—cautioned you—about spindles? It was the first word you learned, the last thing you heard before bed at night, the one lesson of any import: Do not touch spindles. And you forgot it—ignored it?”
“I said I was sorry.”
“Sorry? Do you not understand that we are ruined?”
“Ruined?” Father is making quite a fuss. “Certainly it is inconvenient, but—”
“Inconvenient! Talia, do you not understand? Could you be so stupid?”
I feel tears springing to my eyes yet again. He has never spoken to me in this manner. “Father, your voice. Everyone will hear you.”
“What does it matter? If, as you say, we have all slept these three hundred years, we are ruined, destroyed—you, I, the entire kingdom. We have no kingdom. We have no trade. We have no allies to defend us. Mark my words, it will not be long before everyone realizes that my daughter is the stupidest girl on earth.”
“But…but…” I can hold back my tears no longer, and when I look at my father, I see something horrible. He is struggling to hold back his own. My father, the king, the most powerful man in all Euphrasia, is weeping, and it is my fault, all my fault.
“It was a mistake!”
“You cared for no one but yourself, Talia, and we are paying the price. It would have been better had you engaged in any other youthful indiscretion—running away, even eloping—rather than this one. This has affected everyone, and it is unforgivable.”